Judith Rodenbeck’s photos of found objects are related to the practice of flânerie, but not exactly. Whereas flânerie is defined as aimless, idle wandering and observing, associated with Baudelaire, Paris, with commodities and leisure (and maleness), Rodenbeck’s walking traverses various formal and informal pathways along the edge spaces of the Arroyo Seco Parkway, whose eponymous river runs from the San Gabriel Mountains down into the Los Angeles River, and are propelled and guided by the biological needs for exercise and defecation of a vigorous herding dog, Stella.

This constraint—daily, multi-mile, local movement on foot, passing through natural yet human-altered landscapes—has yielded an intimately forensic practice. What if one were to examine the ground as if from the point of view of a dog? How many marks of our kin we might find there: fragments of publications, advertisements, chance combinations of colored plastics and organic materials, disarticulated signs recombined. A second constraint is prompted by the ubiquity of social media platforms for the digital imagery so readily generated by our pocket devices: there is one photo per day. It is often published on Instagram under the general title Arroyo Tarot as a tongue-in-cheek retort to artful meals, self-advertisements, and other heroic flossing, and in the vain hope of flooding the AI archive with flotsam. The developing photographic practice, informed by New Topographics, presents pictures in a matter-of fact non-moralistic and non-romantic way. The printed photos are clean; there are no smells, no other sensory input. The pictures have a deliberate forensic clarity; nothing has been touched; just the facts.

In another topographical twist, the presence of the Mexican Loteria card La Sandia together with other fragments of printed matter hints at an alternative system of gestalt meaning, neither psychological nor political, the system that joins divination, spirituality, intuition and chance, as well as border spaces and survivance. Photos of cards, texts, and other floating signifiers found on the ground, including even the instruction booklet for the Smith-Waite tarot, are carefully arranged in a proxy for cartomancy and glued on the “floor” of the Proxy Gallery, while on the back “wall” a monumental photo of a vertical culvert wall with a storm drainpipe “vanishing point” and some colorful accumulated debris in the foreground shares startling compositional dynamics with Theodore Gericault’s 1819 Raft of the Medusa. This is an edge-space that is neither “nature” nor “civilization.”

In a gesture of perhaps scholarship, (or meta-picture) Rodenbeck zooms out and gives us a graphic map of the whole area of the Arroyo Seco where all these walks take place as well as sections of the concrete overpasses. This 1936 map is B+W and is photocopied from a publication; it is not a photograph. Significantly, it is glued on the outside of the left “wall” of the Proxy, raising the question of whether this information is intrinsic or more of a footnote or an “index” to the exhibition.

For more information visit Proxy Gallery online here.

For past Proxy Gallery shows at Beyond Baroque click here.